Wall Street Crowds Into Trader Joe’s for Bond Deals: Mortgages

Morgan Stanley is selling about $1 billion of commercial mortgage-backed securities with five of the 10 largest loans tied to retail buildings, including specialty supermarket Trader Joes in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Kings Food Market in Millburn, New Jersey. Photographer: Francis Specker/Bloomberg

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Wall Street is scouring the U.S. for
grocery stores as bankers are pushed out of lending to trophy
office properties.

Morgan Stanley is selling about $1 billion of commercial
mortgage-backed securities with five of the 10 largest loans
tied to retail buildings, including specialty supermarket Trader
Joe’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Kings Food Market in
Millburn, New Jersey. About half of the largest loans bundled
into CMBS in the past six months are linked to retail, up from
27 percent in December 2007 and as low as 12 percent in June of
that year, according to data compiled by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Wall Street has turned to financing a broad swath of retail
properties, from shopping centers to suburban strip malls, as
insurance companies and government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac offer better lending terms on the best office buildings and
apartments. Investors are wagering the economic recovery is
strong enough to justify buying the securities even as analysts
and debtholders are concerned that the deals include too many
stores amid restrained consumer spending.

“In this market you eat what you kill,” according to Alan
Todd, head of CMBS research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in
New York. “If those are the assets you find you can originate,
than those are the properties you find in the deal.”

About $16 billion of mortgages on retail properties
packaged and sold as bonds come due in 2012. Landlords who need
to borrow more than insurance companies are prepared to lend
will turn to the commercial mortgage-bond market, Todd said.

‘Need More Diversification’

More than 20 percent of investors in a JPMorgan survey
cited heavy retail concentration as their primary concern with
new CMBS deals, the bank said in a report this month. The
proportion of loans linked to retail buildings rose to 45
percent for bonds sold in 2011, from 25 percent for 2007,
according to the New York-based lender.

“We need more diversification in these deals,” said Lisa
Pendergast, a commercial-mortgage debt strategist at Jefferies
Group Inc. “If there is some kind of big hit to the consumer,
you don’t want to have too much retail. It’s not a good
investment decision to put your eggs in one basket.”

Commercial-mortgage bond lenders, who profit on the
difference between what borrowers pay and the cash brought in by
selling the securities, charge higher rates than insurers and
other financial institutions that hold loans on their books.

Difficulty Competing

Wall Street has had difficulty competing against insurers
and government-supported housing agencies since CMBS sales
revived in 2010, according to Darrell Wheeler, a bond strategist
for Austin, Texas-based Amherst Securities Group LP. Issuance of
the securities, which peaked at $232 billion in 2007, plummeted
to $11.5 billion in 2010. Wall Street arranged $28 billion of
the debt last year.

Government-supported entities such as Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac have also increased lending by selling $33.9 billion
of bonds tied to apartment buildings last year, from $21.6
billion in 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg,
reducing another pool of potential borrowers. Multifamily
buildings fell to 5.5 percent of CMBS in 2011 from 18.6 percent
five years earlier, JPMorgan data show.

Lending to retail property owners has risks. The average
vacancy rate for neighborhood and community shopping centers was
11 percent through the fourth quarter of 2011, holding at the
highest rate in more than 20 years, according to research firm
Reis Inc.

Sears Holdings Corp., the second-largest tenant in the $600
billion CMBS market, said in December that it was closing as
many as 120 stores after sales fell.

Late Payments

Late payments on retail mortgages packaged and sold as
bonds rose 32 basis points, to a record 7.21 percent last month,
according to Fitch Ratings. That compares with a rate of 8.32
percent for all property types. A basis point is 0.01 percentage
point.

“Moody’s is concerned about retail concentration in CMBS
2.0 deals,” said Tad Philipp, an analyst at Moody’s Investors
Service, referring to deals sold after the boom ended.

At the same time, “the recession did an excellent job of
separating retail winners from losers, and three-year track
records for sales and occupancy are more valuable than ever,”
he said.

Increased lender demand means better terms for mall owners
such as Simon Property Group Inc., the largest in the U.S., and
General Growth Properties Inc.

The largest loan in the Morgan Stanley pool being sold is a
$130 million mortgage to The Shoppes at Buckland Hills, a
Manchester, Connecticut-based mall owned by GGP, according to a
regulatory filing.

Banks Calling

The fourth-biggest is a $65.8 million mortgage on Capital
City Mall in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, owned by Pennsylvania Real
Estate Investment Trust. The real estate investment firm used
the loan to refinance maturing debt, the filing shows. Mary
Claire Delaney, a spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley, declined to
comment.

Andrew Ioannou, senior vice president, capital markets and
treasurer of the REIT, said since the commercial mortgage
market’s revival banks are now calling them instead “of the
other way around.” One advantage is Wall Street allows
borrowers to take on more debt in exchange for higher interest
payments, he said.

“Without a doubt the CMBS market right now is more
aggressive than it’s been in a long time,” he said.

Relative yields on top-ranked commercial-mortgage bonds
have narrowed 48 basis points this year to 213 basis points,
according to a Barclays Plc index. The spread is the narrowest
since July and fell in January by the most in almost two years.

‘Sexiest Looking’

Deutsche Bank AG is planning a $1 billion CMBS deal as soon
as this week, according to a person familiar with the deal, who
declined to be identified because the transaction hasn’t been
announced. Banks are arranging as much as $11 billion in new
sales through April, according to Commercial Mortgage Alert, an
industry newsletter.

Investors got accustomed to seeing Manhattan trophy
properties in 2007 when Wall Street was offering low rates and
high leverage, said Pendergast of Jefferies. Buyers should be
looking for stable properties in reasonable markets, she said.

“It may not be the sexiest looking deal, but that doesn’t
make it a bad thing,” the Stamford, Connecticut-based
strategist said of lending to less prominent buildings.

Economic Outlook

The retail industry has spawned an array of property types
over the past 15 years, from neighborhood strip malls to outdoor
lifestyle centers, according to Ryan Severino, an economist at
Reis, and some have withstood the economic downturn better than
others.

“We are very picky with what we will do,” said Paul
Vanderslice, co-head of the U.S. CMBS group at Citigroup Inc. in
New York. “Shopping centers anchored by grocery stores are very
good, and are a much better bet than a third-tier regional
mall.”

The retail loans getting placed into recent deals have
relatively low leverage, meaning the owners are not as deeply in
debt, said Harris Trifon, a commercial-mortgage debt analyst at
Deutsche Bank in New York.

“Barring some catastrophic change in the economic outlook,
most of the properties should perform as expected,” Trifon
said. “It’s not going to be a situation where all of a sudden,
all of the retail loans start going bad at the same time.”

Still, shopping malls in slow-growth markets, with
significant exposure to a single tenant or with unproven track
records do show up frequently in CMBS 2.0, according to
Amherst’s Wheeler.

Even as the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent
in January, the lowest since February 2009, from 10 percent in
October 2009, consumers remain defensive about spending, said
Severino of Reis. Household purchases climbed 2.2 percent in
2011 after an increase of 2 percent in 2010, the weakest two-year performance of any expansion since the end of World War II.

“We are definitely over-retailed as a country,” said Bank
of America’s Todd. “If the third mall in a one-mall town is the
largest loan in the deal, then obviously the retail
concentration works against you.”